Faculty Listing

Associate Professor

Oliver Simons

Oliver Simons studied German literature, cultural studies, and philosophy at Humboldt-University
in Berlin, where he received his Dr. phil. in 2005. His teaching and research interests focus on
literature and science, post-colonial studies, the "end" around 1800, and literary theories.

His first book, a comparative study on spatial concepts in philosophy, empirical psychology,
art history, and literature around 1900, appeared in 2007: Raumgeschichten. Topographien der
Moderne in Philosophie, Wissenschaft und Literatur (Wilhelm Fink Verlag). His second monograph,
a book on literary theories, was published in 2009 (Literaturtheorien zur Einführung. Junius Verlag).
In addition, he has co-edited essay collections on German colonialism (Francke Verlag 2002),
Kafkas Institutionen (Transcript 2007), and Ingeborg Bachmann and the media (Vorwerk 2008).
He has contributed essays to such journals as Monatshefte, Germanic Review,
German Quarterly, and the Zeitschrift für Germanistik.

Currently, he is preparing a book manuscript tentatively titled Inversions, Folds, and
Anamorphosis: A Spatial History of Poststructuralism. By juxtaposing Kant with Foucault,
Leibniz with Deleuze, and Descartes with Lacan, this study reconstructs three different intellectual
and scientific traditions of spatial thought. In a second book project on The Ends of the
Eighteenth Century, he examines how textual endings around 1800 correspond with theories of
causality and conclusion. In addition to these projects, he is co-editing The Oxford Handbook
of Carl Schmitt, bringing together insights from a variety of disciplines, including law,
literature, and political science.